


Something Greater

by meredyd



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Season 6 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 06:06:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14970692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meredyd/pseuds/meredyd
Summary: "As you have found, the lions choose their pilots. It is a mystical bond and cannot be forced. The quintessence of the pilot is mirrored in his lion."





	Something Greater

**1\. Guardian Spirit of Fire**  
Keith loves the desert but nobody believes him. Nobody, and they’ve all been plenty clear about it. Too dry, too hot, too empty and boring. That last one - they know Keith well enough to ask if he’s lonely, but not well enough to ask if he’s bored. 

It takes time to survive, Keith explains, and the Garrison, and looking for the Blue Lion, and there wasn't a ton left for anything else. He goes to bed early and wakes up early and runs through the unforgiving landscape with a comforting burn in his lungs and his muscles. 

They’re eating crackers, and because nobody wanted crackers, the mango gummies Lance and Hunk special order off the internet, and milkshakes Hunk made with the blender Shiro gave to Keith with the idea he’d actually use it. 

Pidge says, with her mouth full of gummy, which she has decided to eat in a little sandwich on the crackers. “Can we go to Shiro’s house now? No offense,” she glances around, as if afraid they are being listened to by the very person she’s about to offend, “Your house is booooooring. Kiyomi’s making dinner and the dogs are there!” 

“The dogs, Keith,” says Lance in desperation. Keith feels his face getting hot, he wrings his hands in and out, crushes the cracker into little pieces. 

“Just stay until tonight, okay? I promise, it’ll be cool. And if it’s not, we’ll go over to Shiro’s.”

“Shiro has air-conditioning,” says Pidge with the longing of a lost sailor. 

*

They’ve been in space and they know from stars. But this is something else, a different place than it was a few hours ago, Hunk says, as wide-eyed as he’s ever been. It’s clear as far as the eye can see and even beyond that. And any battles, they all of them think, are safely away. The only ships that pass are hardly blips. 

Keith makes a fire. He’s sure they’ve forgotten how cold it gets at night, Pidge shivers in her t-shirt and he drags an old throw out for her to wrap herself in. As it crackles and sparks they make s’mores on wooden sticks, Pidge and Hunk sing off-key, irritating songs they learned in Scouting. The smoke rises higher and higher into the air, a hot spring on a frozen mountain. 

“Are you homesick?” Pidge asks, balancing a piece of chocolate on top of completely burnt marshmallow. 

“We’re home,” says Keith, uncertain. “Why would I be homesick?”

She lowers her glasses, fogged from smoke, and thinks better of saying anything. Keith isn’t the best at reading Pidge, but he could be almost sure she smiles. 

**2\. Guardian Spirit of the Forest**  
The first thing Katherine Holt says to Takashi Shirogane is, “It’s a plant.” With an air of incredulity that would set anyone else off on the wrong foot, but which Shiro will later tell her instantly won him over. 

“You’ve seen one before,” Shiro says. “Matt would have me believe otherwise.” He adds, when Pidge is visibly blushing, “It’s a succulent, so…no pollen. And it’s really hard to kill.”

“Perfect,” Pidge says. “I can’t wait to put it somewhere special and forget I have it.”

Takashi isn’t a big laugh-out-loud guy, Pidge can already tell, but she likes that about him. She likes a lot about him. Her nervousness evaporates entirely. 

*

“Remember the day we met?” Pidge asks absently, not looking up from her laptop while she tinkers with his arm. “You gave me a plant. And now look at me. Greening the cube one galaxy at a time!” 

“A plant?” says Shiro. in the same coarse, pulled-tight tone he sometimes gets but never with her, like this, even during routine matinenace. “I think I’d remember that.” 

“The first time you came to my house before the Kerberos,“ 

They meet eyes and she knows. That’s when she knows, and that’s when she finishes her job as Shiro would want her to, with hard work and good humor, before she excuses herself, checks and waters the Euphorbia lactea, with the little white tuft that reminds her of Shiro’s hair, that will soon be too big for it’s pot, and doesn’t talk to anyone for two days.

 **3\. Guardian Spirit of Water**  
The thing is, Lance has a big family and everyone is good at something. Not just kind of good, really good. Moms are always putting new stuff in the Sanchez y Borrego Trophy Cabinet in the front hall good. He couldn’t, he often reflects, come from one of those boring families where all they do is nerd stuff, like the Holts, not that he doesn’t love the Holts, it’s just that everyone in Lance’s family is good at acting or good at football or good at cooking or playing an instrument or drawing, something cool, and sometimes, once---

“Why don’t you go out for the swim team?” Mama asks him. “Instead of hanging around here all summer feeling sorry for yourself?”

“I won’t be the best swimmer,” says Lance decisively. 

“Yeah,” shrugs Mom. “Maybe. But you might be the next Rodolfo Falcón. You won’t know until you try.”

*

So Lance tries. Mom and Mama drop him off at the local pool’s swim club orientation, where he has to pass a small test for which he demands his parents and his eldest sister Rosalinda (prodigy football star on her own way to practice) stay and watch. 

“We don’t like parents to stay and watch,” says his potential future coach, a sunburned but friendly older woman with the uncanny ability to sense children who are most desperate for attention. “But in this case…”

“Well????” Lance asks, as soon as his head clears the surface. He has done the butterfly, the backstroke, the doggy paddle, the hold-his-breath-underwater, the sidestroke, and a bunch of really cool dives off the big kid diving board. 

“Well,” says the coach, “You did a great job, Lance. You have a lot of potential to be a wonderful addition to our team.”

Lance bobs his head until it feels like it’s going to fall off his waterlogged neck. 

“Next year,” Mama adds, before coach can break it harsher. “She thinks you need a bit more time, sweetheart.”

For a week Lance is in a sulk the likes of which nobody in his family has ever witnessed before. 

“Do you think he’s going to go into a cocoon?” The twins ask. “Do you think he’s doing a political protest against all of us being the greatest ever?” Gloria and Rebecca are immediately grounded, which brings Lance some small measure of comfort. 

“We think you’re a beautiful swimmer,” says Mama. “The way you love the water is really special. But you need to practice at everything, right?"

"Sometimes that’s just how it is," Mom adds. "And as long as you’re enjoying yourself, that’s what matters. Okay, Lance?"

It is a good Mom Talk. Lance makes the swim team a year and a half later, still not totally believing it. 

**4\. Guardian Spirit of the Land**  
When Hunk’s stomach and brain are nervous and his eyes start to dart around like poison arrows, and he’s maybe about to be sick in the cockpit, because this is crazy! This is way too high for any normal guy like him to be! Even someone from the Garrison, who studied and planned for this. This is too far away. 

When it’s like that, Yellow purrs first warm, and low, distant thunder, then louder, until she's enveloping Hunk is what he’s only been able to describe to Pidge as kind of a glowy feeling, and inevitably he’s thinking about his feet in the sand on the beach in front of his grandparents’ restaurant, or that time they had a campfire with Keith they all pretended not to like, or the way Shay’s hand feels inside his, so different from human flesh but lovely, and solid.

Every planet they’ve been to is so different, Hunk thinks then. _Yes, yes_ , Yellow reassuringly purrs. They’re full of different food and music and culture and things to learn, ways to look at or fix things he’d never think of in a million years on his own. How they’re welcomed each place now with such hospitality. Not each place — but Hunk likes to hope for that, to hope for friends, wherever they touch down, whatever they save. 

_That’s who I am_ , says Yellow. _That’s where I come from, my power, my strength. Every new soil and every new person._

__

And Hunk thinks, that’s not so bad. 

**5\. Guardian Spirit of the Sky**  
Every Shirogane has been a pilot. That’s just the way it was. It was a heady brew of choice and talent and destiny, that led them down that path, and Shiro had never for a second resented it. It excited him, the future. The possibility to go further still tethered by the wisdom of his mother, her parents, everyone who had come before them. It was easy to excel, because every fiber of his being was meant for this. 

And now?

And now: having your soul sucked back into a body that is both your body and not is exhausting business, and even Shiro has to concede that his original plan to sneak out of his command to “rest” as soon as it was possible is not as he himself would say "workable”. So here he is instead. Broken and reformed and broken and reformed again. Waiting for Pidge to make him a new arm. 

And really, really superficially distracted by the obvious fact of his hair. 

“Alteans had a saying, you know,” Allura says. 

“Really? I’m shocked Alteans had a saying.”

If they weren’t themselves - a touch, a hand on his shoulder, something. But they were themselves. Now they were a bit of each other, too. An idea so enormous in it’s scope for how frayed at the edges they all were. Shiro hid it away for much, much later. He got the feeling Allura had done the same. 

“You tease your orange-haired humans, like Coran, for being temperamental, although they also take great pride in their hair.”

“That’s…definitely true about Earth culture, yes,” Shiro says, making his voice sound as friendly as it possibly can, flexing the stiff muscle in his shoulder so he can turn and face her in the doorway. “This is leading up to something about me, isn’t it? Some kind of insult?”

“On the contrary,” Allura says. “How could that be, when the Princess of Altea herself has such beautiful hair?” She purses her lips, trying, he can see, not to laugh. “They would say you’re quite a _Fesseni _. The word would roughly translate as “bonehead”, however.”__

__“Great.”_ _

__“It has a less insulting connotation for the color as well,” says Allura, sitting down with her usual careful precision on the edge of a chair. She glides two fingers along the ends her plaits. “It might sound like ‘sky-touched’, or something similar. Temperamental maybe, even if they keep it inside themselves.” Allura shoots him a glance, which he returns. “But destined for greatness, somehow. ‘The skies will look over you and out for you’.”_ _

__Shiro’s avoided looking at himself in the mirror. There’s no need, for one, for another, he knows how beaten down he must appear. But now he does, with Allura’s words making little echoes in his head, not quite words at all, as they sometimes now can do. Behind him he can see her looking too, both of them with what must be approval, and something inside of him is let free._ _

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to ehmazing as usual for the Altean word she spun off the dome, barkour/Anna for letting me steal Lance's last name she came up with, and Phee for drawing the pictures that inspired this fic in the first place. http://hawberries.tumblr.com/post/146888481192


End file.
